Product Announcement—July 23, 2021

Recently Released

For Career Services…

Virtual Appointments

Virtual appointments on Handshake are now available! Built with seamless, integrated video (that you’ll recognize from virtual fairs), virtual appointments help you provide a flexible, comfortable experience for students no matter where they are. This feature is free for all partners to use.

• Learn how to configure virtual appointments here

New Dashboards

Three new insights dashboards focused on student equity, virtual engagement, and employer relations give your team access to a trove of actionable insights. Ready to use out-of-the-box, your team can monitor your relationships with students and employers, and tell your team’s story to campus stakeholders. Check out the dashboards below:

• Student equity
• Virtual engagement
• Employer relations

Note: These dashboards have been released in the US. UK partners keep an eye on your newsletter for details on the release of your dashboards.

For Employers…

Job Matches Email

A few weeks ago, we announced we were experimenting with sending an email to employers once they’ve posted a job. The email drives the employer to visit the matches tab where they can review students who qualify for the position and send them a message encouraging them to apply. The experiment led to statistically significant upticks in employers visiting the matches tab and sending messages to qualified students. Thus, we’ve decided to launch it as a permanent notification email for employers.

Coming Soon

Interested in learning about virtual fair updates? Check out our virtual fair release notes for more details. We’ll share more information on these updates in the coming weeks!

For Career Services...

Multi-School Fairs

This summer, Handshake is making it easier for our partners to collaborate on multi-school fairs. With access to their students’ registration and attendance data, and the ability to email students about the fair through Handshake, schools invited to the fair can function as true co-hosts.

• Learn about multi-school fair updates here

Flags & Decline Reasons

We’re implementing updates to our flag taxonomy to keep them focused on identifying fraud and abuse, plus adding new notifications for career services if an employer they previously approved is flagged. We’re also expanding decline reasons to encompass both employers and jobs and will soon surface them to employers to provide more transparency around the approvals process.

• Read more about these updates here

For Students…

Mobile App Update

This summer, we’re updating our mobile app interface—the fresh, new look will highlight more opportunities for students to build relationships with employers.

• The updated interface will roll out on iOS and Android over the summer. Check out an early mockup of what the new jobs and relationships feed might look like here.
• We’ve launched a preliminary experiment that rearranges some of the navigation tabs in the app. Note that the School/Institution tab will move to the Account menu.

Parsing Public Resumes/CVs

When students upload a resume or CV, they’re shown the option to automatically populate their Handshake profile with information from the resume/CV. We’re now able to parse even more information from resumes/CVs and want to provide students with more opportunities to take advantage of this enhancement. In the coming months, we’ll offer to build out student profiles in more places that involve a resume/CV upload, like when registering for a virtual fair or applying for a job.

• For students that have an existing resume/CV on their profile that’s public to employers, we’ll automatically parse out key information like work experiences and skills so that employers can use it (aggregated and anonymized) to target their messaging campaigns. This will save students the step of having to add the information to their profiles and make them more likely to receive relevant outreach from employers.

Self-Reported Race/Ethnicity

Similar to self-reporting gender, which launched last year, students will soon be able to self-report their race/ethnicity in Handshake. This data will be stored separately from race/ethnicity imported by your institution and, with the student’s consent, shared with employers (anonymized and aggregated) to help them craft campaigns.

Virtual Info Chats

This summer, we’re launching virtual info chats—informal, 15-minute 1:1 conversations between a student and employer, hosted on Handshake. Virtual info chats were created to help students connect with employers in a less intimidating setting to get an inside look at company culture and available opportunities. They also allow employers to take a more personalized approach to recruiting and make a lasting impression on potential applicants.

• All employers (free and premium) will be able to offer students availability for virtual info chats via messages they send to students and, later, within job postings too.

For Employers…

Job Page Refresh

We’re updating the job page for employers to make it more actionable and easier to navigate. Updated tabs for job details, target institutions, student matches, and applicants will encourage employers to connect with a wider pool of students.